Sell Chicken Smoothie (Poll Has Been Reset!)

[Mountain Lion]

I really don't understand, but maybe that's because I'm a "new user". I made my account a little less than a year ago, during the Halloween 2019 event. Chicken Smoothie has seemed pretty alright to me since then... Am I misunderstanding something?

I don't think the problem is that there is nothing to do/nothing to enjoy here, because it is. The problem is that with time most expect games to develope more, get new functions and get better. Cs does change, but from my understaning many feel like it doesn't change as much as it should do. Older players will not be as interested anymore.

i don’t think I’ve ever joined a free game really expecting much change? I joined 5 years ago and the lack of change doesn’t really bother me, y’know?

kinda related to this I just feel like there’s a lot of folks on this thread speak so dramatically about this (‘we’re crying for help’, ‘justice for chicken smoothie’) like somebody died lmao. I know it’s easy to say ‘if you don’t like it just quit’, but if it’s causing people so much stress that a free pet site hasn’t developed, why continue to bother with it?

I think when people say it's dead they're talking more about the community.
Every Dec 18, the "most users online" record would be broken. That stopped in 2017, so CS's active users are declining or at least plateaued there.
I do think that if the virus continues into December, though, that record would be broken again.

[Maligator]

I really don't understand, but maybe that's because I'm a "new user". I made my account a little less than a year ago, during the Halloween 2019 event. Chicken Smoothie has seemed pretty alright to me since then... Am I misunderstanding something?

I don't think the problem is that there is nothing to do/nothing to enjoy here, because it is. The problem is that with time most expect games to develope more, get new functions and get better. Cs does change, but from my understaning many feel like it doesn't change as much as it should do. Older players will not be as interested anymore.

i don’t think I’ve ever joined a free game really expecting much change? I joined 5 years ago and the lack of change doesn’t really bother me, y’know?

kinda related to this I just feel like there’s a lot of folks on this thread speak so dramatically about this (‘we’re crying for help’, ‘justice for chicken smoothie’) like somebody died lmao. I know it’s easy to say ‘if you don’t like it just quit’, but if it’s causing people so much stress that a free pet site hasn’t developed, why continue to bother with it?

No, the issue really isn’t that it hasn’t developed and changed a lot, it’s that there is such a huge lack of communication between staff and user, and nobody is ever really heard here anymore. This suggestion board is not really payed attention to, and therefore users are not being seen and changes that the community wishes to see aren’t getting implemented. Not only that, but we never get many updates on what the staff are doing behind the scenes. It’s just frustrating for people who have been here for a while and know that the site USED to do all of that and more. There used to be updates, the suggestion board had more attention paid to it, and the owners of the site were involved and it seemed like they really cared.

To say something along the lines of “people are stressing that a site hasn’t developed”, Tells me, respectfully, that you may have missed the point of why this thread was made. ^^*
Also, there are a lot of people on this site who grew up here, and it actually makes them really sad that it doesn’t seem like it’s cared about by the owners as much as it really used to be. The users here not only love it here because of the pets and cute art, they love the community, and it makes them sad that so many people are leaving because the site isn’t what it used to be. We aren’t upset just over the game not getting all sorts of brand new features all the time, and hopefully this helps clear it up a bit. (:

[ElementalInsanity]

As an older player who’s been here from the beginning my perspective is:
I don’t think CS is boring exactly. It’s why I’ve stuck around is because it’s easy and not super pressing. I’ve quit quite a few games recently and before that had events one after the other.
What I’m wanting to urge for is more updates. QOL ones. Fun ones. There’s tons of suggestions for things. And communication about updates or anything really. Stuff to make the site feel alive again. Would I love maybe another event? Sure. Do I expect one? No. I can’t imagine the time and work that already goes into the ones we have, let alone would the artists even want to make more pets for another event.
And while you can argue yes this is a free game there are quite a lot of us that do put money into the site for whatever thing or reason. I don’t think it’s wrong after putting time and effort into this site for twelve years or putting who knows how much money into it that I speak what’s on my mind.

[nickjr]

As an older player who’s been here from the beginning my perspective is:
I don’t think CS is boring exactly. It’s why I’ve stuck around is because it’s easy and not super pressing. I’ve quit quite a few games recently and before that had events one after the other.
What I’m wanting to urge for is more updates. QOL ones. Fun ones. There’s tons of suggestions for things. And communication about updates or anything really. Stuff to make the site feel alive again. Would I love maybe another event? Sure. Do I expect one? No. I can’t imagine the time and work that already goes into the ones we have, let alone would the artists even want to make more pets for another event.
And while you can argue yes this is a free game there are quite a lot of us that do put money into the site for whatever thing or reason. I don’t think it’s wrong after putting time and effort into this site for twelve years or putting who knows how much money into it that I speak what’s on my mind.

This exactly! I love CS and have been here for almost 12 years now. This thread isn't really "there's nothing else to do on CS"; it's more like "this is an example of why we can't have anarchy" "the stuff and systems [I'm not talking about the server] that worked when CS was a small site are getting rather strained now that CS is a fairly big site and things have been strained for... like... five years"

[troyards]

i'm surprised the item pound/lost and found wasn't brought up at all within the last few pages regarding quality of life updates and how slow they are when they're something we need v something that's fun and fresh.

let me give you all a little timeline on how the pound has changed within the last 12 years:

first, way back when in 2008 it was opened about whenever tess was online; given that she lives (lived?) in new zealand, this is a good 16 hours ahead of the majority of the player base. obviously this wasn't sustainable, so they changed it to automated times so nobody had to hit "go live" on the pound opening in the middle of the night for either party.

the second "big" change was changing from having all the pets avaliable at a given pound opening to it showing you a random handful. the way the old pound worked was that if you were there early enough and had a good internet connection to counteract how slow the server was, you could hit up the last few pages and get the Good Good Pets.

that particular part of the pound system was changed in 2010, for reference. ever since the pound was A Thing, it had been suggested that we should also have an item pound in conjunction. obviously it wasn't as feasible with the old old system before it was fully automated and randomized which was fine, i get it.

but, in the time between 2010, when the pound system was changed to what it is today, to 2018, when we got the item pound we got:

• the first summer event in 2012, which have only gotten more "complicated" on the back end ever since
• various oekaki features, though i cannot find when the oekaki was first introduced
• updated pet rarities, also 2012
• the stamp feature in 2014, which still has a MISSPELLED STAMP for which i posted about in the thread (it's the crochet stamp. i do not feel as though this warrants a whole ticket, but if i need to send one one to finally get it fixed darn it i will because this still makes me Smad)
• even a myriad of other pound updates, like changing the adopt cooldown, how many times it opened, yada yada, but they were not the lost and found

among other things i may be forgetting/can't find from the announcements board/don't want to list because they aren't on the same "level" as an item pound.

my point being: maybe it's because i don't quite Get Programming Or Coding, but what was so fundamentally different from pets that it took EIGHT WHOLE YEARS for us to get an item pound? was it that Difficult to code that we got it six years into having summer events? specifically it was AFTER the lost city event which i remember for having slightly complicated rng and needing to trade your tokens for other tokens at the end because of how it was and how many you needed for certain things. i even made a google doc about how perfect your rng needed to be to get one of everything within the shortest amount of time.

this is not accusatory in any way, i'm just outlining how long it took for certain qol improvements to actually happen. we just got the ability to actually block people from replying to our topics/seeing our posts/trading us, which is... how a block function should work from day one. the focus is more on Fun, Fresh things than things we actually need, which i think is why we're all feeling as though the communication from the players through the staff chain from mods to admins isn't there because FOR YEARS we had been begging for the darn thing and it was on the backburner. i, personally, gave up on an item pound around 2015/2016 because of all of the other things we were getting.

i think i wouldn't be so hard on the lost and found if, during those eight years, we had updates regarding where it was at. it was a big site feature that, from my humanities scholar eyes, looks more like it just wasn't A Fun Feature so it isn't going to be focused on rather than this is a feature we need but it's taking a while so here's some updates. we won't know either way since we now have had it for two years, so i'm just purely speculating and spitballing.

on the event talk: i just want One Event that isn't the advent calendar where i don't have to set timers for banners. i like how there's some time between events compared to other things i plays (like elder scrolls online extending the halloween event because of server issues and then not having a break between that and the new years event which had oNE DAY between that and the pvp event). i don't know what this banner-less event will look like (the woof cup, perhaps? if we remember that?) but it would be nice to have. it doesn't have to be yearly or replace anything, but variety is the spice of life, ya know?

[Mountain Lion]

my point being: maybe it's because i don't quite Get Programming Or Coding, but what was so fundamentally different from pets that it took EIGHT WHOLE YEARS for us to get an item pound? was it that Difficult to code that we got it six years into having summer events?

CS has only one programmer, iirc: Nick.

[darkspawn]

i'm surprised the item pound/lost and found wasn't brought up at all within the last few pages regarding quality of life updates and how slow they are when they're something we need v something that's fun and fresh.

let me give you all a little timeline on how the pound has changed within the last 12 years:

first, way back when in 2008 it was opened about whenever tess was online; given that she lives (lived?) in new zealand, this is a good 16 hours ahead of the majority of the player base. obviously this wasn't sustainable, so they changed it to automated times so nobody had to hit "go live" on the pound opening in the middle of the night for either party.

the second "big" change was changing from having all the pets avaliable at a given pound opening to it showing you a random handful. the way the old pound worked was that if you were there early enough and had a good internet connection to counteract how slow the server was, you could hit up the last few pages and get the Good Good Pets.

that particular part of the pound system was changed in 2010, for reference. ever since the pound was A Thing, it had been suggested that we should also have an item pound in conjunction. obviously it wasn't as feasible with the old old system before it was fully automated and randomized which was fine, i get it.

but, in the time between 2010, when the pound system was changed to what it is today, to 2018, when we got the item pound we got:

• the first summer event in 2012, which have only gotten more "complicated" on the back end ever since
• various oekaki features, though i cannot find when the oekaki was first introduced
• updated pet rarities, also 2012
• the stamp feature in 2014, which still has a MISSPELLED STAMP for which i posted about in the thread (it's the crochet stamp. i do not feel as though this warrants a whole ticket, but if i need to send one one to finally get it fixed darn it i will because this still makes me Smad)
• even a myriad of other pound updates, like changing the adopt cooldown, how many times it opened, yada yada, but they were not the lost and found

among other things i may be forgetting/can't find from the announcements board/don't want to list because they aren't on the same "level" as an item pound.

my point being: maybe it's because i don't quite Get Programming Or Coding, but what was so fundamentally different from pets that it took EIGHT WHOLE YEARS for us to get an item pound? was it that Difficult to code that we got it six years into having summer events? specifically it was AFTER the lost city event which i remember for having slightly complicated rng and needing to trade your tokens for other tokens at the end because of how it was and how many you needed for certain things. i even made a google doc about how perfect your rng needed to be to get one of everything within the shortest amount of time.

this is not accusatory in any way, i'm just outlining how long it took for certain qol improvements to actually happen. we just got the ability to actually block people from replying to our topics/seeing our posts/trading us, which is... how a block function should work from day one. the focus is more on Fun, Fresh things than things we actually need, which i think is why we're all feeling as though the communication from the players through the staff chain from mods to admins isn't there because FOR YEARS we had been begging for the darn thing and it was on the backburner. i, personally, gave up on an item pound around 2015/2016 because of all of the other things we were getting.

i think i wouldn't be so hard on the lost and found if, during those eight years, we had updates regarding where it was at. it was a big site feature that, from my humanities scholar eyes, looks more like it just wasn't A Fun Feature so it isn't going to be focused on rather than this is a feature we need but it's taking a while so here's some updates. we won't know either way since we now have had it for two years, so i'm just purely speculating and spitballing.

on the event talk: i just want One Event that isn't the advent calendar where i don't have to set timers for banners. i like how there's some time between events compared to other things i plays (like elder scrolls online extending the halloween event because of server issues and then not having a break between that and the new years event which had oNE DAY between that and the pvp event). i don't know what this banner-less event will look like (the woof cup, perhaps? if we remember that?) but it would be nice to have. it doesn't have to be yearly or replace anything, but variety is the spice of life, ya know?

this this this ^^^


I never realized how long people were waiting for the item pound. 8 years! I'm very curious as to what goes on behind the scenes. Does staff come up with ideas to improve the site and just don't really act on them often or do they wait for the community to make suggestions? Because either way, it feels like not much ever really changes. I think the last big change I saw was the rarity update but isn't that just a threshold change?? Plus it felt like it came out of the blue. I just wish staff would keep us updated on their plans so that we have more to look forward to.

Also ik CS only has one programmer, I'm confused as to why another programmer has never been added to the team. It would take a lot of pressure off of Nick.

[Lemon Tea Rain]

Please read this the whole way through before replying to me, thank you! This isn't in disagreement with the thread or any points made, only the title.

I'm rather confused as to why the most drastic (and possibly even the most aggressive sounding, although that's likely just my biased perception of it) suggestion is as the title? Perhaps it's just a way to get the attention of staff, but for the longest time it threw me off even looking at the thread because it seemed like some extreme thread for some disgruntled people with a grudge against the creators of cs. It sounds like a personal demand rather than a helpful thread on how to breathe life back in to the website we all enjoy. After looking through the posts and the (incredibly helpful, might I add) first page I can tell that this thread being aggressive or a personal grudge just isn't the case of the thread at all, but for the longest time that's how the title read in my mind and I'm wondering if it's creating a bias against the thread. Even now when I read it, everything seems more extreme or opinionated than I would typically perceive it, just because the title has such an extreme outlook and I immediately see it as more of a personal issue against the staff than I would were the title something less extreme/demanding like "saving chickensmoothie" or something like that. I feel like it creates an unnecessary bias against the thread for people who would likely agree if they actually read what was being said, but write it off because the title takes such an extreme and/or aggravating stance in some people's opinions.

If someone could give me a better explanation of why "sell chickensmoothie" is the name of thread other than just that the creator of the thread likes the option, I would really appreciate it since as I said I believe my outlook may still be biased and perhaps someone else's less biased explanation would help me understand better. I do wonder if it's only me who got an immediate bad taste in their mouth after reading the title, or if other people felt the same. (And just to add, I have read the little "Why Is This Titled "Sell CS" section, but it just kind of reads as "this is the option I like the most so I put it as the title") I'm also not disagreeing with the thread, because the facts are there and I can't sit and deny that people are leaving and change is needing when you all bring such good suggestions, points and facts to the table. I just feel that the title is scaring people off and preventing them from taking the thread seriously enough to read all the good points that are made.

Massive thanks to anyone who reads and helps me understand better. <3

[cαtαstrσphe]

it is extreme yes, but other threads have been called "save CS/show us that you care" etc. and were all ignored, locked, or created arguments, so the extreme measure we felt was needed. The explanation on the front page, and many responses before about this, may further help you understand our reasoning for the title. c:

[Tailish]

Please read this the whole way through before replying to me, thank you! This isn't in disagreement with the thread or any points made, only the title.

I'm rather confused as to why the most drastic (and possibly even the most aggressive sounding, although that's likely just my biased perception of it) suggestion is as the title? Perhaps it's just a way to get the attention of staff, but for the longest time it threw me off even looking at the thread because it seemed like some extreme thread for some disgruntled people with a grudge against the creators of cs. It sounds like a personal demand rather than a helpful thread on how to breathe life back in to the website we all enjoy. After looking through the posts and the (incredibly helpful, might I add) first page I can tell that this thread being aggressive or a personal grudge just isn't the case of the thread at all, but for the longest time that's how the title read in my mind and I'm wondering if it's creating a bias against the thread. Even now when I read it, everything seems more extreme or opinionated than I would typically perceive it, just because the title has such an extreme outlook and I immediately see it as more of a personal issue against the staff than I would were the title something less extreme/demanding like "saving chickensmoothie" or something like that. I feel like it creates an unnecessary bias against the thread for people who would likely agree if they actually read what was being said, but write it off because the title takes such an extreme and/or aggravating stance in some people's opinions.

If someone could give me a better explanation of why "sell chickensmoothie" is the name of thread other than just that the creator of the thread likes the option, I would really appreciate it since as I said I believe my outlook may still be biased and perhaps someone else's less biased explanation would help me understand better. I do wonder if it's only me who got an immediate bad taste in their mouth after reading the title, or if other people felt the same. (And just to add, I have read the little "Why Is This Titled "Sell CS" section, but it just kind of reads as "this is the option I like the most so I put it as the title") I'm also not disagreeing with the thread, because the facts are there and I can't sit and deny that people are leaving and change is needing when you all bring such good suggestions, points and facts to the table. I just feel that the title is scaring people off and preventing them from taking the thread seriously enough to read all the good points that are made.

Massive thanks to anyone who reads and helps me understand better. <3

it is extreme yes, but other threads have been called "save CS/show us that you care" etc. and were all ignored, locked, or created arguments, so the extreme measure we felt was needed. The explanation on the front page, and many responses before about this, may further help you understand our reasoning for the title. c:

I second the clockwork cat in this. It is an aggressive title, but it's also a necessary one.

One of this thread's forerunners was Flatterina's Show us that you care, which also has a Title with a capital T. It's goal was similar to this one: get a response (literally any response) from staff, because users felt they were being left behind. The difference is that it never got a response, partially because it didn't gather the momentum this thread had. The thread was eventually locked to prevent ranting, which was frustrating for the people involved because it kneecapped the thread. A thread that can't be posted in can't gather any support, and so there was virtually zero chance that the admins would see it, much less reply to it.

Lacuna, who locked the thread, explains the position the staff was in: "the threads were at that time devolving into ranting because we felt we could not give a response; we understand why people were frustrated, but we felt our hands were tied because the thing we were supposed to do was wait for a founder to reply."

The problem was that the thread wasn't garnering enough attention or momentum to do two things: a) provide enough fresh voices to limit ranting amongst a few users, and b) get the attention of staff. This thread, however, has managed to do both of those things, and in my opinion that excuses a multitude of sins.

I don't mind that the title is almost clickbaity - I think that in this one specific scenario that's a good thing, because (for the most part!) it encourages people to come onto the thread and post their opinions, which is necessary to keep the thread alive and well. The "extreme position" of the title forces users to think about where they stand in relation to that title, which sparks debate and an honest conversation about why a suggestion this extreme is even being considered. And that's the best part of this thread - that we're finally having this conversation.

This is a hard topic and it is an extreme suggestion, but the success of the thread speaks to the fact that a suggestion this extreme was needed. I personally don't think it causes people to be biased against the thread, since most people have come forth with their support and honest contributions (and also i spent a while on that front page post so like i hope they get the point), up to and including staff and site admins. A massive shoutout to the mods and staff who have participated actively in the thread and made sure the atmosphere stayed positive <3


Edit: also, the second update post includes a link to another part of the thread where the title was under discussion that you may find interesting!

also also while i don't have an issue with the title the poll could be designed better, it's very binary right now